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U.S. newspapers saw daily circulation fall 7.1 percent and Sunday circulation dip 5.4 percent during the period from October to March, compared with the same six-month time period a year earlier.

Newspaper executives -- including Times Publishing Co. chairman, CEO and editor Paul Tash, have explained that circulation losses for some papers have come from deliberate business changes (for the St. Petersburg Times, we stopped including Monday newspapers with a Sunday subscription) and that readership for media companies that own newspapers has increased.

This was a point I also made a few weeks ago during a public forum with Frontline executive producer David Fanning; more folks than ever are experiencing our journalism, thanks to online outlets and new platforms such as TBT, PolitiFact and Bay magazine.

But the primary way we make money is in decline, as classified advertising suffers, display advertising slumps and the numbers of people who pay for subscriptions to the newspaper drop.

So concluding that subscription declines are the result of political bias or journalistic ineptitude is, I think, missing the point. We're in the midst of a historic shift of consumer habits, from platforms where media companies made lots of money on the audience (traditional newspaper subscriptions) to places where they earn much less money on them (online platforms, free tabloids).

Which leads to several questions: Should media companies try to combat audience attrition, or find ways to make more money on the platforms that are growing? And what if both strategies fall short?

Click below to see the circulation figures for the Top 25 newspapers Sunday and weekly, along with Florida's biggest newspapers. *